L'hiver
by Robin Siskin
Summary: Because flesh is just flesh, and they are both human. [sight and taste and sound burning up your newborn baby soul][Ichigo x Ishida][AU][Winter]
1. Flowers

Sometimes Ichigo questions his beliefs, as he lies on Ishida's floor, listening to the scratch of pencil against paper as Ishida does his homework or works on some project or another. There is always silence, always an almost unbearable cleanliness, and the sun always shines in through a window brightly, unbearably bright. It never smells like anything, there. Even the flowers that are placed in an impeccable vase in the exact center of the coffee table don't smell like anything. Chrysanthemums and poppies. Always chrysanthemums and poppies.

He asked Ishida, once, why they were always chrysanthemums and poppies, and had received a mumbled response about how they matched with his decorating scheme. It's as good an answer as anything. It's probably true, too, because when Ichigo gets bored enough and takes the flowers out of their careful arrangement and plays with them, counting the petals on the chrysanthemums and pressing the poppies so close to his nose that they're almost up it (if he does this enough, he wonders absently, will he get high? poppy seeds make you high, will this make him high?), Ishida doesn't say a word. He doesn't even look over (sometimes Ichigo wonders if he sees more of Ishida's back than he does of his face), actually, and Ichigo can never tell if this is a blessing or a curse.

Ichigo does a lot of wondering when he is with Ishida.

When the pencil finally stops scratching and the chair scoots back (miraculously avoiding making an annoying squeaking noise on the ground; somehow, it is more annoying that the Quincy manages _not _to allow his chair to grind against the ground than it would be if he did), and Ishida comes over and kisses him and Ichigo is allowed to run his hands all over him, there is still wondering in the back of his mind. He does not know if he is in love with Ishida or if he is in love with the way his hair falls in his face when they are making love (Ichigo would usually call it fucking but it is really not fucking what they do, it is different, even if neither of them can explain why it is different) or the way his hands refuse to hold onto Ichigo when he is close but grasp at the carpet or the blankets or the nearest solid object instead, or the curve of his spine or how his composure seems to crumble just a little bit during or the way his eyes glaze over and stare off at nothing after and the way he will indulge Ichigo's desire for skin-on-skin contact when his eyes are glazed over like that and will not pull away and will even let him touch his hair a little….He wonders if things would be different if they were anywhere but here, if they were on a beach, maybe, Ernest Hemingway style, in the south of France, and they could just make love over and over and never be tired of it, to always be thirsty for it, hungry for it, thinking of it even as they eat breakfast and tea and going to bed as soon as the sun goes down, with no thought for consequences. Would Ishida be different, if there were no consequences? He thinks of himself as the hero of a Hemingway novel, sometimes, with Ishida his glamorous fiancée, and the both of them fish and swim and lie on the beach, and the both of them get tanner and tanner. "How dark will you get?" Ichigo will ask one day, maybe, and Ishida will reply that he wants to get darker and darker, so dark he won't be able to stand it. It wouldn't work, he knows, even as he thinks it (if Ishida spent that much time in the sun he would be so sun-burnt it wouldn't be funny, so sun-burnt he wouldn't be able to stand it), because Ishida is not the kind to change his image for the sake of rebellion or for anything's sake, and Ichigo is not the kind who could become accustomed to that kind of idyllic existence, even if there were no consequences. He would get restless, itchy, uncomfortable in his own skin, and in the end they would be back to where they started.

Now he twirls one of the poppies from the arrangement in between his fingers, sniffs at it experimentally even though he knows it won't smell like anything, and bites it. He half-expected it to taste sweet, but it doesn't taste like anything except for vaguely plant-y, the way he remembers leaves tasting when he ate them sometimes as a toddler. He can't remember much from when he was that young, but he remembers eating leaves. As he swallows and pulls the stem out of his mouth and looks at the bite mark in it absently, he wonders if maybe one day, when he's old and decrepit (if that day ever comes), if he will not remember much of this time in his life but will remember these days lying on the ground with his shirt riding up his stomach and his arm behind his head feeling vaguely cold from the breeze wafting in through a window along with the sounds of cars and people and dogs and wind and life, biting into the stem of a poppy to see what it tastes like and kill time until him and Ishida will make love right there on the floor with the windows open and the vaguely cool breeze wafting in through an open window.

There is the small, insignificant sound of a pencil being placed on a desk, and Ishida slides back in his chair and stands up in that irritatingly silent way of him. Ichigo sits up. Ishida sits down. Both of them are lying back down within thirty seconds, and in another sixty seconds they are both more or less naked and the cold is chased away by the warmth of skin against skin and the silence doesn't seem so silent anymore.


	2. Sky

Sometimes Ishida feels, as him and Ichigo lie on the ground in the park even though all the benches and tables are free and the only children there are a set of twins gliding back and forth slowly on the swings, that he is so powerful that he could reach up into the sky slowly, lazily, and brush the clouds away as casually as he might brush away cobwebs in the corner of a neglected closet in his home. He holds his hand up towards the sky sometimes (his left hand, always his left hand, only his left hand), clenches and unclenches his fingers, and when he brings it down half-expects it to be draped in fluffy, clinging white strands. It never is, of course. He could not even touch the sky if he wanted to, much less grab hold of the clouds and bring them down to earth. Can Ichigo touch the sky? He probably could, if he wanted to, if he really wanted to. Would Ichigo touch the sky if he asked him too? Sometimes Ishida feels that he would. 

Ichigo had asked him once what he was looking for when he did that, but he had never really answered. He never really thought that there was a need to. Their relationship is not the kind where questions are asked and answered and answered and asked in a never ending cycle of gaining and sharing knowledge. They are both content with their knowledge of the world (or as content as they can be at this stage in their lives) and with their knowledge of each other. If they discover more about each other, that is glorious, wonderful, blissful, but if they don't it is not hell. Their relationship is not a Q&A relationship. It is more of a feeling relationship. They sit or lay or brood or make love in silence and think and feel and love, and their connection comes from that fact that they can _feel _each other (and not in the way they can _feel _spiritual pressure; if Ishida entered a sexual relationship with everyone whose spiritual pressure he could feel and who could feel his spiritual pressure, he would be sleeping with way too many people, most of which he doesn't care for, and besides, Ichigo can't sense spiritual pressure, anyways, so it would be rather onesided), and Ishida feels sometimes that this is a better mold for a relationship than any he could have with somebody else.

Ishida does a lot of feeling when he is around Ichigo.

Now he can feel the grass under his back even though he is wearing three layers of clothing and one of said layers is a thick dark pea coat and another is a flannel top. It is cool, smooth, calming in a chilly sort of way. It is cold enough outside that he thinks (feels?) that if he was to scoot closer to Ichigo maybe he would wrap an arm around him. The action wouldn't mean anything if it did happen. Ichigo is the kind of person that would take off his shoes in the Land-of-Broken-Glass-Ground and give them to someone he barely knows, the kind of person who would take off his hat in the land of Birds-That-Like-To-Shit-On-People's-Heads and give it to someone he barely knows if that someone complained of a cold head. And it's not because he's necessarily a very compassionate person, Ishida thinks sometimes. He is simply reliable.

Ishida feels that he can live with reliable.

Ishida does a lot of feeling when he is around Ichigo.


	3. Scarf

It is very cold outside. Ishida's breath comes in white puffs in front of him and every time a wind rolls by it blows down the back of his shirt in a way that makes him shiver and brings goose bumps to his arm not so much because it is cold but because it reminds him of Ichigo's breath on the back of his neck before, during, after. The grocery bag in his arms is a mixed blessing: bad, because it contains an obscenely cold carton of milk that he is forced to hold right against his core; good, because it lets him wrap his arms around something and not look conspicuous in the middle of the street. 

It wouldn't matter if he looked conspicuous, anyways, because there is barely anyone out. They are smart to be inside. It is very cold outside.

"Hey, Ishida!" It can be only one person. They rarely talk when they are together but he would still recognize the voice even if he lost his hearing. He doesn't need to turn around to see him, because within a few seconds Ichigo is right next to him, panting a little, his cheeks flushed with the cold. It clashes with his hair. Ishida thinks it doesn't clash in a terribly unfashionable way.  
"Kurosaki," he says, and wraps his arms around his groceries tighter. He is about to open his mouth and ask what Ichigo is doing out in this kind of weather (a mixture of rain, tiny specks of ice that never quite made it to be snow, and a few errant snowflakes is falling gently down around them), maybe suggest that he come home with him, when something obnoxiously bright obscures his vision, makes its way down to his neck. Both of them have stopped walking, and Ichigo is in front of him, his eyebrows furrowed more than usual in concentration as he maneuvers his arms around the bag of groceries in Ishida's arm, adjusting a scarf so that it sits in a somewhat normal position around his neck.  
"There," Ichigo says, smiling triumphantly and tugging on one end of the scarf a final time before getting back beside Ishida. "You'll catch a cold if you don't wear that."

It is a very ugly scarf – all royal blue that burns his retinas to look at it against their washed out, almost gray surroundings and striped with a glaring yellow that would give a bumblebee a hard-on - but it stops the wind from blowing down the back of his neck, and that's a relief. And it's soft. Soft like Ichigo's hair is, not silky or anything describable but just soft in a comforting sense. He has to fight the urge to reach up and touch it, and is once again grateful for the groceries.  
"…Thanks," he says, and they keep walking. Ichigo's hands are planted firmly in his coat pockets now, and that is good, because some part of Ishida had been expecting him to offer to carry the bag, and while being given a scarf to keep from getting sick is one thing, having your (lover?) carry your groceries is quite another. It would be weird. It would make it feel too much like the kind of high school romance that ends with conception in the back of a car, greasy wife-beaters, and six little snot-nosed brats running around in Pull-ups and white tank tops with Spaghetti-O stains dribbled down the front. They are both male and the possibility of getting knocked up is nonexistent, of course, but the possibility of being tied down in the future because of an overload of commitment _now _is very real, and it's a frightening notion. He does not have any plans for his life, not really, not at this point, but if he did, such a possibility would completely ruin them.

Sometimes Ishida wonders exactly how pathetic it is that he is willing to go so far to protect nonexistent plans for his future.

There are times when he thinks it is not pathetic at all, that it is only human nature and only natural to be wary of getting too close to a man who has a catastrophic effect on the lives of those around him, and there are times when he thinks that he should throw himself at Ichigo, latch onto his legs and beg forgiveness before launching into a series of the sappiest, corniest, most ridiculously romantic things he can think of. There are days when he does not think of Ichigo at all, does not even remember he exists or that they have been screwing for close to a year now until he greets him with more enthusiasm than an acquaintance should or asks him how he did on an exam or what he is doing his final essay on.

There are also days when he wants to throw himself off the roof of the school, he is so full of love for him and his mind is so full of images of him.

They are in front of his house now and Ichigo pauses for the barest breath of a second before continuing on walking towards his own home. There is no goodbye. Ishida thinks that they don't need one, but that both of them would have probably benefited from it. He opens his mouth to ask if Ichigo wants to come inside, if he wants to sit down and have a cup of coffee, to tell him that he'll see him at school…but before he says anything he closes his mouth, and smiles to himself. He watches Ichigo's back grow smaller for a moment until another wind blows by; he shivers, and opens the door to his home, and goes inside.

It is, after all, very cold outside.


	4. Fence

It is colder up on the roof than it is inside the school, full of warm bodies sweating and moving and talking and breathing and feeling and _being_, and Ichigo likes it better that way. Amongst all those warm bodies _being _it feels like a man could lose himself, could sink into the crowd of people the same way the monochrome of their uniforms always sinks in together, never to be seen again. Up on the roof, especially when Chad and the others are not around, it is just him and Ishida, and it is nice. He can feel Ishida in a way that he cannot feel others, even if they are not in sync with each other's emotions like the lovers in stories always seem to be, but he doesn't feel like he's going to sink into Ishida in disappear. 

"You're going to fall if you stand up there," Ishida tells him from where he is seated cross-legged on the ground, picking at his lunch absently. Ichigo is hanging onto the fencing around the roof of the school; it is semi-rickety and he supposes that he might actually fall off if he puts any amount of force against the fence. Somehow, it doesn't worry him. He stays like that for awhile, and then sighs and turns around, slides to the ground with his back against the fencing. They are about a yard apart.

"Come sit over here," Ichigo says. "It's cool." It is; the wind rattles against the fencing and gives the illusion (or reality) that it is about the give at any moment. Both of them know that is not the reason that he's called over Ishida, though.  
"It's probably even colder over there than it is over here," Ishida says, irritably, almost squawking over the wind. He comes over anyways, and the fence rattles again in that soothing way with the added weight of Ishida's back against it. "It _is _nice," he allows after awhile, adding under his breath, "But damn cold." He laughs, then, and leans his head back against the fence, closes his eyes.

They are silent for awhile, and the wind blows their hair in their faces and leaves their noses and hands and lips feeling cold. It is not a neglected kind of cold, the kind of cold he would probably feel if everyone left the school and he was alone inside of it, or if everyone left the world and he was alone in it. It is a fulfilled, gentle kind of cold, like Ichigo thinks he might feel if he went down on an Ishida carved out of ice; numb, but pleasantly so, no annoying tingle to remind him that he still exists but just a lack of feeling that is not scary because it is bound to go away eventually.  
"Your food will get cold," Ishida says after awhile, his eyes still closed, head still tilted back.  
"It was cold to begin with," Ichigo replies off-handedly, and to tell the truth even if his lunch was actually hot when he bought it, he doesn't care if it's ice cold now. He's not very hungry. From the sandwich abandoned where the two of them were eating before they moved to the fence, neither is Ishida. He wants to put his arm around Ishida, wonders if he did if he would disappear or if he would stay longer. It is impossible to tell.

Eventually it seems as though they have been sitting there forever (and he could stay like that forever, he knows he could, if he could just put his arm around him or sit closer so that their shoulders and hips are touching, he could stay like that forever if they could have just a little bit of physical contact), and Orihime and Tatsuki come up.  
"What are you two doing?" One of them, probably Tatsuki, shouts over the wind. "Lunch is almost over."

The numbness recedes.

Ichigo bounces up to his feet, sighs.  
"Alright, alright. I'm coming. Ishida?" Ishida comes to his feet slowly, straightens out his clothes.  
"Let's go." He gathers up his things quickly, bends over and slings his book bag over his shoulder.

The numbness disappears.

They walk into the school, and inside it is hot, hot, stifling, stifling. The rest of the day he and Ishida do not talk at all and he is only vaguely disappointed when Ishida beats him out of the school at the end of the day and they do not walk home together.


	5. Coffee

It is hard to breathe when it is cold outside, and harder still when _he _is around. There is something in the way Ishida holds himself when he is around people other than Ichigo, something in the way he walks, in the way his eyes never contain that soft semi-glazed look they do when he is completely relaxed, that is fascinating. It is utterly and entirely fascinating and Ichigo loves it. He wonders if he acts different when he is around people other than Ishida, if that is utterly and entirely fascinating. Does everyone act differently around different people? Are the personalities everyone shows to everyone else shams? Ichigo doesn't think that what he shows to others is a sham. But then again, sham is not defined. Is it a proper noun, Sham, a huge affair, a huge taboo, a Deadly Sin that incorporates any and every act involving deception of a certain brand? Or is small sham, something insignificant, something nearly nothing qualifies for?

Both are possibilities.

Now they are walking home together as a group, under the pretense of socializing but probably only because it is too cold to walk home in smaller groups, and steam rises from everyone's mouth and noses in little puffs (little cigarette puffs, Ichigo thinks later, and part of him wants to relay this phrase to Ishida but most of him knows that it would be of little significance). Hands are tucked in pockets, scarves wrapped securely around necks (he notices, without much interest initially, that Ishida is wearing the scarf he gave him the other day; later he will recall this with startling clarity and will fight the urge to jump or dance or do something drastic because even though he doesn't know quite what it means it feels like a victory and tastes like something bolder than lust), hats shoved tightly on heads. Ichigo knows his hair is rumpled. Ishida's looks like, if he were to stalk up to him and rip off his hat, his hair would be perfectly tidy. If he were to drag him into his house and take him his hair would probably not be perfectly tidy. This is a thought that comforts him.

Slowly, dizzily, people pull off from the group as their homes approach. One by one by two by one, as smoothly as animals pick off of a herd by some brutally efficient predator. Ichigo knows that when they get to Ishida's house, they will part ways and not speak until the next time one of them needs a pencil at school and nobody else is available for one. He knows this to be so and had accepted it long ago.

But then, surprisingly, miraculously, when it is just the two of them left and they reach Ishida's house, Ishida turns and opens his mouth.

"Kurosaki." The few simple syllables are enough to turn the cold insignificant and distant, to make him feel as though his mind is disconnected with his body a bit. "Would you like to come inside?" Ichigo doesn't say anything in response, just follows after the Quincy into the home that he's been in so frequently but never except for sexual favors and almost never in the past few weeks. He steps inside gratefully and is only mildly surprised to find that the indoors is only slight reprieve from the cold outside.

"I'm sorry about the cold," Ishida says as he slings his backpack off of his shoulder and tucks it neatly against the entryway wall. "I leave the heater off if I'm not going to be home."  
"It's fine," Ichigo says. It is. He sets his own book bag down near where Ishida set his, and stands there with his hands wanting to bury themselves in his pockets and his eyebrows feeling like they did not want to stay in their customary scowl. "Mind if I turn the TV on, or something?"  
"No." It is not curt, simply detached. Ichigo thinks he can accept detached. Cabinets come open softly in the kitchen, the couch sinks softly under Ichigo's weight as he plops down on it. Within seconds, without thinking, the TV is on, and he is staring blankly at the screen as Steven Hill and Sam Waterson go over the same ground over and over again and that god-damned annoying Law and Order theme plays. He hates that show. The smell of coffee drifts into the living room from the kitchen.

In a few minutes Ishida enters and puts two cups of coffee on the table.

"I know you don't like it this way but my coffee pot is broken," he says blandly, as if he really feels the need to apologize for something like not having the proper equipment to make coffee quickly.  
"It's okay. I don't care." He doesn't. Ichigo reaches out for the cup closest to him and takes a drink. It is boiling hot and bitter.  
"That's good, then."

They sit in silence in a room that is faded and gray (like their love? or was that never there to begin with?), sipping scalding hot coffee that tastes cheap and bitter.

Ichigo is tempted to say something, about the weather, about how ass-cold Ishida's house is, about sex, about the scarf, about anything, just to hear himself talk. It is creepy to simply sit in a house with the TV playing softly and the coffee cooling much more quickly than it should. They should be _talking _on a day like this, figuring things out. It would help even if they just talked about stupid things ("and we talk of things that matter in words that must be said, 'is analysis worthwhile, is the theater really dead'" Simon and Garfunkel remind him dolefully in his head), just _talking _would help. He opens his mouth to say something but then Ishida is over him, face centimeters from his own, hair hanging down onto his face, and before he has even registered what is going on Ishida's lips are pressed to his own. It is soft, soft, and faded, very faded. Ishida's tongue dips into his mouth, ghosts over the roof of his mouth, his molars, his canines, incisors. There is something deliriously comfortable about feeling the warmth of his body against the cold of the room. Ichigo reaches a hand up to touch him, maybe his shoulder, maybe his arm, maybe his hair, but then Ishida is gone. The only sound is the soft moist friction of their mouths coming apart and the creak of the couch as it adjusts to the subtraction of Ishida's weight and the rustle of fabric and the slam of the front door as he leaves. Ichigo stays there on the couch like that for awhile, blinking and feeling the breeze from the ceiling fan skitter over his face, fleetingly.

"God _damn _it," he says to himself, in the faded gray emptiness of the house. "God _damn _it." He gets to his feet, grabs his backpack, and leaves Ishida's house for home. It is cold outside, and starting to rain down a mixture of snow and rain and ice. It accumulates on the curbs in dirty piles of slush.

Ichigo hates the winter.


	6. Stall

A/N - Last section of the winter segment. I'm starting work on spring, after that comes summer and then fall. Cowritten with the lovely Homeslice, say thankya, because I can't do smut at all and this chapter required a bit of smut. You'll be able to tell where she did some of the work, you'll notice spots where I couldn't edit it enough to make the styles mesh completely.

0000000000

The school is quiet, disinterested the next day. Ishida did not get back to his home until around midnight, after he had walked until his feet had felt ready to fall off and his clothes had stuck to him wetly and his hair had been plastered down to his head, clinging to his face in dark strands (needy strands) that had refused to let go and had just stuck to his fingers when he tried to brush them away. He never did get to sleep.

No, he hadn't gotten to sleep. He had sat up, first on his bed, and then on the couch, tracing patterns on it, running his fingers over it, laying down on it at times and pressing his face into the place where the seat cushions meet the cushions on the back. He had thought, then, that in underneath the cleanliness of his house he could vaguely smell Ichigo, some overbearing, powerful, overwhelmingly _Ichigo _smell underneath it all, and although later he thinks that it was just his imagination then it had been some sort of comfort, even though when he had walked out of his house out into the rain he hadn't even thought that he needed comfort. He felt almost tired, then. Almost. The taste of Ichigo's mouth, predominantly like the bitter coffee he had made for them both but with that powerful overwhelmingly _Ichigo _taste like his smell underneath that taste, had kept him from really getting tired. So he hadn't slept.

He isn't tired, though, even if he can't concentrate. He sits at his desk, fiddling with his pencil, wondering if he will be able to understand the lecture tomorrow if he doesn't pay attention today, wondering if Ichigo is paying attention, wondering how long Ichigo stayed at his house after he left, wondering if Ichigo walked in the rain for hours before he finally made it home, if his hair clung to his face and head in damp needy strands.

The school is quiet, disinterested.

Even the teacher's lecture is slow and somber, muted the way the sound of rain is muted against the roof, muted the way sex sounds are muted through apartment walls: audible, but as if through a filter, as if underwater. Quiet, disinterested. It is as if the whole school stayed awake all night, as if everyone is tired, in a daze. Ishida isn't tired.

By the time lunch-time rolls around students are slumped in their desks, their heads propped up on their hands, eyelids drooping. They all pack up their things slowly, mechanically, and go out of the room like ghosts, drifting palely, until it is just Ichigo and Ishida left in the room.  
"Ishida." Ichigo is in front of his desk now, hands braced on either side of it, his face kissing-distance from Ishida's.  
"Kurosaki, what…"  
"Come with me."

Ichigo grabs his wrist and drags him out of his desk, pulls him out of the classroom and down the hall. He turns sharply into the bathroom and then lets go of Ishida's wrist. Before Ishida has even had time to register what is happening, Ichigo's fist connects with his face and he is on the ground, his vision filled with flashing black spots and the tiny gray tiles on the bathroom floor. When the spots clear (it feels like a dizzy millennium but it is probably less than fifteen seconds), he pushes himself to a sitting position and touches at his face experimentally, wincing.  
"I think I know what that was for," he says. He gets to his feet and he is face-to-face with Ichigo. There are bright, hectic spots of color high up on Ichigo's cheekbones, and his brows are furrowed so deeply that Ishida thinks it must be giving him a headache. It is an entire minute before Ichigo replies.  
"If you didn't I'd have to hit you again," he says, and the words sound forced out. He is panting a little.  
"I'd deserve it, if you did." It is awkward, uncomfortable, as if Ichigo never really thought of what he was going to say or do.

Ichigo looks up, then, and there is knowledge in his eyes-, Ishida knows now that he's figured it out, and he knows what it is that he's figured out, and he knows that, from the very beginning, he will let him. It is only natural. It's how they work, how they compromise, how everything works out in the end, except this time Ichigo needed to do something else, and now that is over and they have to fill the empty silence with themselves: they know what they need to do to do that.

Within five seconds they are in a stall and within another three Ichigo's mouth is on his, hot like his hand is on the cool tiles of the bathroom wall, sweaty and shaking a little, fingers curling helplessly.

It's not a war for dominance. Ichigo obviously has no intentions of submitting.

When Ishida runs his hands through Ichigo's hair (almost tentative, almost needy, needy like damp strands of hair clinging to a pale cold wet face) he feels the dampness there and suddenly there is no way he can pretend it's just sex, because it is something more. It is how they communicate (because if they tried to do it with words their stories would always be too long, far too long), how they express themselves. And maybe, if they manage not to screw it up, it can be a kind of medicine.

Yes, maybe it can be a medicine. He can feel Ichigo's hands press him against the wall. Their clothes fall away slowly, like palely drifting ghosts.

It is easier, kinder, simpler, to communicate and heal this way. Because, even though it is possibly vulgar (And what is vulgarity, anyways? Piles of dirty slush melting on the sides of a slick dirty road, chrysanthemum petals fluttering to the ground? Strands of blue and yellow yarn twisting out of a scarf?), the way Ichigo's hand is slipping into his pants, he can almost feel the wrongness, any wrongs that they did before, slipping away.

Now his pants are down by his ankles, and he thinks suddenly, strikingly, in a way that makes his knees weaker than they were before, that Ichigo knows what he likes before he's even sure of it himself. It strikes him, then, that Ichigo has paid attention when they made love before, and he thinks that that is very sweet of him, to not think of only himself during (because Ishida will admit to himself, if not to anyone else, that when he makes love with Ichigo he is not thinking of remembering the movements that make him moan loudest or the places that make him squirm the most when they're touched, but simply of increasing his own pleasure), very sweet, too sweet, more sweet than he deserves.

Ichigo pauses for one moment in stroking his erection to remove his shirt, and then he unbuckles his belt before returning back to Ishida, almost comically using one foot (still wearing his shoes and socks: it is so powerfully, overwhelmingly Ichigo to crave all this skin-on-skin contact and to yet still be wearing his shoes) to drag down the pant leg of the other, until they are both down a couple of inches below his knees and he kicks out of them.

Ishida tells him to lock the door and he does so without complaint, but an easy compliance that is still overbearingly, overwhelmingly _Ichigo_ and then he returns back to him and gets on his knees. His mouth is hotter than when it was against Ishida's own, when his lips are around the head of his penis and his hands are wrapped around the rest of him, sliding and almost squeezing and rubbing in fast strokes, soft strokes, any kind of strokes he could imagine.

It feels good, Ishida thinks -- thinks he maybe says, but can't tell, until Ichigo lets go and his mind clears just a little bit, and he is almost sure he _did _say it. Then Ichigo has lube in his hands, dug out from the front pocket of his backpack, right when he was about to tell him he had a tube in his backpack, too, and he thinks maybe, just maybe, they both thought this would happen because that's what always _does _happen, that's what can be expected from their relationship, which is built on physical touch, taste. It's just how it is, except now that's not _all _it is, and there's more emotion, which he thinks (knows) has always been there, now, even though they covered it up because that's the type of people they are (but it's not all they are, not anymore, not now, not when Ichigo is so _close to him _and he can feel him breathing down his neck, with the type of physical closeness that is as emotional as it is tangible, and that makes them something else, something they weren't, but now somehow are, maybe always were).

Ichigo is flat up against him, Ishida pressed still against the wall, wondering how they are both standing at all, wondering if maybe they will just stay like this, simple and loving and something _more _without there being anything more at all. Then Ichigo moves a little bit, and suddenly he is entering him, face pressed into Ishida's collarbone and Ishida groans half in pleasure and half in pain because it's painful, it always will be, this kind of unnatural coupling, but it's still so powerfully _Ichigo _that he can't help but wonder why it is considered unnatural at all.

Ichigo stays there for a second, a second that feels like it stretches on for a (dizzy millennium) an eternity except it doesn't, not really, not in retrospect, and then he pulls back and grips Ishida's hips in his hands (which feels good too: it is rough, it is unadulterated, it is no longer angry but it's more than anger could ever be… it is frustration that says 'you will understand, you will get it, you will see', and oh, Ishida does see, he does get it, he gets it all, a little bit more, with every thrust, every flex of Ichigo's thumbs on his hip bones and the tips of his fingers stretching over to rest on his buttocks, every grunt, every quiet breath not quite pant that is still somehow _screaming, _screaming for release), and Ishida doesn't think it's vulgar or crude anymore.

It's not quite beautiful, of course, but it's close.

Ichigo rears back, thrusts back in, a slow rocking that lets their hips meet together in a kiss in the same moment their lips do, before they are running their heads down on different sides of the other's neck, kissing there, biting and nipping in a sense that is not romantic but is necessary, a necessary medicine, and Ichigo increases the pace at a rate that seems so natural, increases it at a rate that Ishida thinks must be engrained in his body for it to be so fluid, that both their bodies must be telling him to.

"Faster, damn it, faster...damn you, Kurosaki, _faster_," is that it? Or is that just some voice in the back of his mind, the dark place in the back that controls all these desires and urges and makes him moan like a whore in a bathroom stall? There is only movement-, back and forth, back and forth, in and out, in and out, like breathing, aligned with their breathing, still as harsh and needy.

Ishida's head falls back limply against the tiled bathroom wall, and he realizes they're _sliding _with it, up and down, because now they're _sweaty _and _slick _and _wet _(wet like the way a person gets wet when he walks out in the rain after sunset?). Ichigo has stopped kissing and biting down his neck: now he is just standing there, thrusting, forehead pressed into Ishida's collarbone, arms hoisting up Ishida's legs, sweat rolling down the sides of his face.

Their bellies touch each other, soft, and sliding; their rhythm dissolves into something even more desperate, and then there are Ichigo's hands on him and his legs are sliding to touch to the ground, maybe because that far away voice was telling him to touch him there again.

Ishida doesn't know, doesn't care, not anymore, just wants to come.

Then he _is _coming, and a moment later so is Ichigo, and then they are panting together in much the same rhythm and Ichigo pulls out and they both slide to the floor.

It occurs to him, then, that they are still at school, that they are on lunch break, and that break will be over soon. He extricates himself from the tangle of limbs that their coupling has turned into, cleans himself off mechanically, pulls his clothes on.  
"I'm sorry, Kurosaki," he says, and it is awkward, still, almost more so now that they are so sweaty and slick and wet and orgasm is nothing except for a fading, throbbing memory sinking into the dark parts of his mind that make him moan like a whore and there is already a dull ache spreading down his legs and into his lower back.

Ichigo's eyes are glazed as he follows Ishida's example and pulls on his own clothes.

"I don't think there's anything to apologize for," he says, and Ishida thinks he is telling the truth.

When they exit the bathroom, both disheveled and flushed and very nearly panting and Ishida with a bruise spreading over his cheek, if anybody heard anything or saw them exiting with guilty looks on their faces, nobody says a word. The school is quiet, disinterested.

Quiet, disinterested.

Snow has started falling outside. It is real snow, not the frozen rain and sleet that has come down before. It slides gently against the windows, quietly, disinterestedly. When school gets out and they walk home, Ichigo puts an arm around his shoulder, and he doesn't pull away. Orihime and Tatsuki and Asano and Chad and the rest seem to notice, seem to know, but they don't seem to care, not on a level that matters. They are quiet, disinterested.

Ishida can live with disinterested.

School is out for winter break the next day. Until school starts up again, they do not see each other and they do not talk to each other, and it is not until the Christmas lights are on outside and the blinds are closed against their brightness and every person is alone in his own, cold bed that either of them even thinks of the other.


	7. Complete

**A/N** – Full version, not split into "chapters", because nee-chan wanted it to be this way. Also edited a bit to take out the American pop culture references and also to make our boys seem a bit more in character, so even if you like it split it might be worth your time to read it. I'll post an updated version as soon as I finish it.

0000000000

Sometimes Ichigo questions his beliefs, as he lies on Ishida's floor, listening to the scratch of pencil against paper as Ishida does his homework or works on some project or another. There is always silence, always an almost unbearable cleanliness, and the sun always shines in through a window brightly, unbearably bright. It never smells like anything, there. Even the flowers that are placed in an impeccable vase in the exact center of the coffee table don't smell like anything. Chrysanthemums and poppies. Always chrysanthemums and poppies.

He asked Ishida, once, why they were always chrysanthemums and poppies, and had received a mumbled response about how they matched with his decorating scheme. It's as good an answer as anything. It's probably true, too, because when Ichigo gets bored enough and takes the flowers out of their careful arrangement and plays with them, counting the petals on the chrysanthemums and pressing the poppies so close to his nose that they're almost up it (if he does this enough, he wonders absently, will he get high? poppy seeds make you high, will this make him high?), Ishida doesn't say a word. He doesn't even look over (sometimes Ichigo wonders if he sees more of Ishida's back than he does of his face), actually, and Ichigo can never tell if this is a blessing or a curse.

Ichigo does a lot of wondering when he is with Ishida.

When the pencil finally stops scratching and the chair scoots back (miraculously avoiding making an annoying squeaking noise on the ground; somehow, it is more annoying that the Quincy manages _not _to allow his chair to grind against the ground than it would be if he did), and Ishida comes over and kisses him and Ichigo is allowed to run his hands all over him, there is still wondering in the back of his mind. He does not know if he is in love with Ishida or if he is in love with the way his hair falls in his face when they are making love (Ichigo would usually call it fucking but it is really not fucking what they do, it is different, even if neither of them can explain why it is different) or the way his hands refuse to hold onto Ichigo when he is close but grasp at the carpet or the blankets or the nearest solid object instead, or the curve of his spine or how his composure seems to crumble just a little bit during or the way his eyes glaze over and stare off at nothing after and the way he will indulge Ichigo's desire for skin-on-skin contact when his eyes are glazed over like that and will not pull away and will even let him touch his hair a little….He wonders if things would be different if they were anywhere but here, if they were on a beach, maybe, Ernest Hemingway style, in the south of France, and they could just make love over and over and never be tired of it, to always be thirsty for it, hungry for it, thinking of it even as they eat breakfast and tea and going to bed as soon as the sun goes down, with no thought for consequences. Would Ishida be different, if there were no consequences? He thinks of himself as the hero of some pretentious American novel, sometimes, with Ishida his glamorous fiancée, and the both of them fish and swim and lie on the beach, and the both of them get tanner and tanner. "How dark will you get?" Ichigo will ask one day, maybe, and Ishida will reply that he wants to get darker and darker, so dark he won't be able to stand it. It wouldn't work, he knows, even as he thinks it (if Ishida spent that much time in the sun he would be so sun-burnt it wouldn't be funny, so sun-burnt he wouldn't be able to stand it), because Ishida is not the kind to change his image for the sake of rebellion or for anything's sake, and Ichigo is not the kind who could become accustomed to that kind of idyllic existence, even if there were no consequences. He would get restless, itchy, uncomfortable in his own skin, and in the end they would be back to where they started.

Now he twirls one of the poppies from the arrangement in between his fingers, sniffs at it experimentally even though he knows it won't smell like anything, and bites it. He half-expected it to taste sweet, but it doesn't taste like anything except for vaguely plant-y, the way he remembers leaves tasting when he ate them sometimes as a toddler. He can't remember much from when he was that young, but he remembers eating leaves. As he swallows and pulls the stem out of his mouth and looks at the bite mark in it absently, he wonders if maybe one day, when he's old and decrepit (if that day ever comes), if he will not remember much of this time in his life but will remember these days lying on the ground with his shirt riding up his stomach and his arm behind his head feeling vaguely cold from the breeze wafting in through a window along with the sounds of cars and people and dogs and wind and life, biting into the stem of a poppy to see what it tastes like and kill time until him and Ishida will make love right there on the floor with the windows open and the vaguely cool breeze wafting in through an open window.

There is the small, insignificant sound of a pencil being placed on a desk, and Ishida slides back in his chair and stands up in that irritatingly silent way of his. Ichigo sits up. Ishida sits down. Both of them are lying down within thirty seconds, and in another sixty seconds they are both more or less naked and the cold is chased away by the warmth of skin against skin and the silence doesn't seem so silent anymore.

0000000000

Sometimes Ishida feels, as him and Ichigo lie on the ground in the park even though all the benches and tables are free and the only children there are a set of twins gliding back and forth slowly on the swings, that he is so powerful that he could reach up into the sky slowly, lazily, and brush the clouds away as casually as he might brush away cobwebs in the corner of a neglected closet in his home. He holds his hand up towards the sky sometimes (his left hand, always his left hand, only his left hand), clenches and unclenches his fingers, and when he brings it down half-expects it to be draped in fluffy, clinging white strands. It never is, of course. He could not even touch the sky if he wanted to, much less grab hold of the clouds and bring them down to earth. Can Ichigo touch the sky? He probably could, if he wanted to, if he really wanted to. Would Ichigo touch the sky if he asked him too? Sometimes Ishida feels that he would.

Ichigo had asked him once what he was looking for when he did that, but he had never really answered. He never really thought that there was a need to. Their relationship is not the kind where questions are asked and answered and answered and asked in a never ending cycle of gaining and sharing knowledge. They are both content with their knowledge of the world (or as content as they can be at this stage in their lives) and with their knowledge of each other. If they discover more about each other, that is glorious, wonderful, blissful, but if they don't it is not hell. Their relationship is not a Q&A relationship. It is more of a feeling relationship. They sit or lay or brood or make love in silence and think and feel and love, and their connection comes from that fact that they can _feel _each other (and not in the way they can _feel _spiritual pressure; if Ishida entered a sexual relationship with everyone whose spiritual pressure he could feel and who could feel his spiritual pressure, he would be sleeping with way too many people, most of which he doesn't care for, and besides, Ichigo can't sense spiritual pressure, anyways, so it would be rather onesided), and Ishida feels sometimes that this is a better mold for a relationship than any he could have with somebody else.

Ishida does a lot of feeling when he is around Ichigo.

Now he can feel the grass under his back even though he is wearing three layers of clothing and one of said layers is a thick dark pea coat and another is a flannel top. It is cool, smooth, calming in a chilly sort of way. It is cold enough outside that he thinks (feels?) that if he was to scoot closer to Ichigo maybe he would wrap an arm around him. The action wouldn't mean anything if it did happen. Ichigo is the kind of person that would take off his shoes in the Land-of-Broken-Glass-Ground and give them to someone he barely knows, the kind of person who would take off his hat in the land of Birds-That-Like-To-Shit-On-People's-Heads and give it to someone he barely knows if that someone complained of a cold head. And it's not because he's necessarily a very compassionate person, Ishida thinks sometimes. He is simply reliable.

Ishida feels that he can live with reliable.

Ishida does a lot of feeling when he is around Ichigo.

0000000000

It is very cold outside. Ishida's breath comes in white puffs in front of him and every time a wind rolls by it blows down the back of his shirt in a way that makes him shiver and brings goose bumps to his arm not so much because it is cold but because it reminds him of Ichigo's breath on the back of his neck before, during, after. The grocery bag in his arms is a mixed blessing: bad, because it contains an obscenely cold carton of milk that he is forced to hold right against his core; good, because it lets him wrap his arms around something and not look conspicuous in the middle of the street.

It wouldn't matter if he looked conspicuous, anyways, because there is barely anyone out. They are smart to be inside. It is very cold outside.

"Hey, Ishida!" It can be only one person. They rarely talk when they are together but he would still recognize the voice even if he lost his hearing. He doesn't need to turn around to see him, because within a few seconds Ichigo is right next to him, panting a little, his cheeks flushed with the cold. It clashes with his hair. Ishida thinks it doesn't clash in a terribly unfashionable way.  
"Kurosaki," he says, and wraps his arms around his groceries tighter. He is about to open his mouth and ask what Ichigo is doing out in this kind of weather (a mixture of rain, tiny specks of ice that never quite made it to be snow, and a few errant snowflakes is falling gently down around them), maybe suggest that he come home with him, when something obnoxiously bright obscures his vision, makes its way down to his neck. Both of them have stopped walking, and Ichigo is in front of him, his eyebrows furrowed more than usual in concentration as he maneuvers his arms around the bag of groceries in Ishida's arm, adjusting a scarf so that it sits in a somewhat normal position around his neck.  
"There," Ichigo says, smiling triumphantly and tugging on one end of the scarf a final time before getting back beside Ishida. "You'll catch a cold if you don't wear that."

It is a very ugly scarf – all royal blue that burns his retinas to look at it against their washed out, almost gray surroundings and striped with a glaring yellow that would give a bumblebee a hard-on - but it stops the wind from blowing down the back of his neck, and that's a relief. And it's soft. Soft like Ichigo's hair is, not silky or anything describable but just soft in a comforting sense. He has to fight the urge to reach up and touch it, and is once again grateful for the groceries.  
"…Thanks," he says, and they keep walking. Ichigo's hands are planted firmly in his coat pockets now, and that is good, because some part of Ishida had been expecting him to offer to carry the bag, and while being given a scarf to keep from getting sick is one thing, having your (lover?) carry your groceries is quite another. It would be weird. It would make it feel too much like the kind of high school romance that ends with conception in the back of a car, greasy wife-beaters, and six little snot-nosed brats running around in training pants, food dribbled down the fronts of their shirts. They are both male and the possibility of getting knocked up is nonexistent, of course, but the possibility of being tied down in the future because of an overload of commitment _now _is very real, and it's a frightening notion. He does not have any plans for his life, not really, not at this point, but if he did, such a possibility would completely ruin them.

Sometimes Ishida wonders exactly how pathetic it is that he is willing to go so far to protect nonexistent plans for his future.

There are times when he thinks it is not pathetic at all, that it is only human nature and only natural to be wary of getting too close to a man who has a catastrophic effect on the lives of those around him, and there are times when he thinks that he should throw himself at Ichigo, latch onto his legs and beg forgiveness before launching into a series of the sappiest, corniest, most ridiculously romantic things he can think of. There are days when he does not think of Ichigo at all, does not even remember he exists or that they have been screwing for close to a year now until he greets him with more enthusiasm than an acquaintance should or asks him how he did on an exam or what he is doing his final essay on.

There are also days when he wants to throw himself off the roof of the school, he is so full of love for him and his mind is so full of images of him.

They are in front of his house now and Ichigo pauses for the barest breath of a second before continuing on walking towards his own home. There is no goodbye. Ishida thinks that they don't need one, but that both of them would have probably benefited from it. He opens his mouth to ask if Ichigo wants to come inside, if he wants to sit down and have a cup of coffee, to tell him that he'll see him at school…but before he says anything he closes his mouth, and smiles to himself. He watches Ichigo's back grow smaller for a moment until another wind blows by; he shivers, and opens the door to his home, and goes inside.

It is, after all, very cold outside.

0000000000

It is colder up on the roof than it is inside the school, full of warm bodies sweating and moving and talking and breathing and feeling and _being_, and Ichigo likes it better that way. Amongst all those warm bodies _being _it feels like a man could lose himself, could sink into the crowd of people the same way the monochrome of their uniforms always sinks in together, never to be seen again. Up on the roof, especially when Chad and the others are not around, it is just him and Ishida, and it is nice. He can feel Ishida in a way that he cannot feel others, even if they are not in sync with each other's emotions like the lovers in stories always seem to be, but he doesn't feel like he's going to sink into Ishida in disappear.

"You're going to fall if you stand up there," Ishida tells him from where he is seated cross-legged on the ground, picking at his lunch absently. Ichigo is hanging onto the fencing around the roof of the school; it is semi-rickety and he supposes that he might actually fall off if he puts any amount of force against the fence. Somehow, it doesn't worry him. He stays like that for awhile, and then sighs and turns around, slides to the ground with his back against the fencing. They are about a yard apart.

"Come sit over here," Ichigo says. "It's cool." It is; the wind rattles against the fencing and gives the illusion (or reality) that it is about the give at any moment. Both of them know that is not the reason that he's called over Ishida, though.  
"It's probably even colder over there than it is over here," Ishida says, irritably, almost squawking over the wind. He comes over anyways, and the fence rattles again in that soothing way with the added weight of Ishida's back against it. "It _is _nice," he allows after awhile, adding under his breath, "But damn cold." He laughs, then, and leans his head back against the fence, closes his eyes.

They are silent for awhile, and the wind blows their hair in their faces and leaves their noses and hands and lips feeling cold. It is not a neglected kind of cold, the kind of cold he would probably feel if everyone left the school and he was alone inside of it, or if everyone left the world and he was alone in it. It is a fulfilled, gentle kind of cold, like Ichigo thinks he might feel if he went down on an Ishida carved out of ice; numb, but pleasantly so, no annoying tingle to remind him that he still exists but just a lack of feeling that is not scary because it is bound to go away eventually.

"Your food will get cold," Ishida says after awhile, his eyes still closed, head still tilted back.  
"It was cold to begin with," Ichigo replies off-handedly, and to tell the truth even if his lunch was actually hot when he bought it, he doesn't care if it's ice cold now. He's not very hungry. From the sandwich abandoned where the two of them were eating before they moved to the fence, neither is Ishida. He wants to put his arm around Ishida, wonders if he did if he would disappear or if he would stay longer. It is impossible to tell.

Eventually it seems as though they have been sitting there forever (and he could stay like that forever, he knows he could, if he could just put his arm around him or sit closer so that their shoulders and hips are touching, he could stay like that forever if they could have just a little bit of physical contact), and Orihime and Tatsuki come up.

"What are you two doing?" One of them, probably Tatsuki, shouts over the wind. "Lunch is almost over."

The numbness recedes.

Ichigo bounces up to his feet, sighs.

"Alright, alright. I'm coming. Ishida?" Ishida comes to his feet slowly, straightens out his clothes.  
"Let's go." He gathers up his things quickly, bends over and slings his book bag over his shoulder.

The numbness disappears.

They walk into the school, and inside it is hot, hot, stifling, stifling. The rest of the day he and Ishida do not talk at all and he is only vaguely disappointed when Ishida beats him out of the school at the end of the day and they do not walk home together.

0000000000

It is hard to breathe when it is cold outside, and harder still when _he _is around. There is something in the way Ishida holds himself when he is around people other than Ichigo, something in the way he walks, in the way his eyes never contain that soft semi-glazed look they do when he is completely relaxed, that is fascinating. It is utterly and entirely fascinating and Ichigo loves it. He wonders if he acts different when he is around people other than Ishida, if that is utterly and entirely fascinating. Does everyone act differently around different people? Are the personalities everyone shows to everyone else shams? Ichigo doesn't think that what he shows to others is a sham. But then again, sham is not defined. Is it a proper noun, Sham, a huge affair, a huge taboo, a Deadly Sin that incorporates any and every act involving deception of a certain brand? Or is small sham, something insignificant, something nearly nothing qualifies for?

Both are possibilities.

Now they are walking home together as a group, under the pretense of socializing but probably only because it is too cold to walk home in smaller groups, and steam rises from everyone's mouth and noses in little puffs (little cigarette puffs, Ichigo thinks later, and part of him wants to relay this phrase to Ishida but most of him knows that it would be of little significance). Hands are tucked in pockets, scarves wrapped securely around necks (he notices, without much interest initially, that Ishida is wearing the scarf he gave him the other day; later he will recall this with startling clarity and will fight the urge to jump or dance or do something drastic because even though he doesn't know quite what it means it feels like a victory and tastes like something bolder than lust), hats shoved tightly on heads. Ichigo knows his hair is rumpled. Ishida's looks like, if he were to stalk up to him and rip off his hat, his hair would be perfectly tidy. If he were to drag him into his house and take him his hair would probably not be perfectly tidy. This is a thought that comforts him.

Slowly, dizzily, people pull off from the group as their homes approach. One by one by two by one, as smoothly as animals pick off of a herd by some brutally efficient predator. Ichigo knows that when they get to Ishida's house, they will part ways and not speak until the next time one of them needs a pencil at school and nobody else is available for one. He knows this to be so and had accepted it long ago.

But then, surprisingly, miraculously, when it is just the two of them left and they reach Ishida's house, Ishida turns and opens his mouth.

"Kurosaki." The few simple syllables are enough to turn the cold insignificant and distant, to make him feel as though his mind is disconnected with his body a bit. "Would you like to come inside?" Ichigo doesn't say anything in response, just follows after the Quincy into the home that he's been in so frequently but never except for sexual favors and almost never in the past few weeks. He steps inside gratefully and is only mildly surprised to find that the indoors is only slight reprieve from the cold outside.

"I'm sorry about the cold," Ishida says as he slings his backpack off of his shoulder and tucks it neatly against the entryway wall. "I leave the heater off if I'm not going to be home."  
"It's fine," Ichigo says. It is. He sets his own book bag down near where Ishida set his, and stands there with his hands wanting to bury themselves in his pockets and his eyebrows feeling like they did not want to stay in their customary scowl. "Mind if I turn the TV on, or something?"  
"No." It is not curt, simply detached. Ichigo thinks he can accept detached. Cabinets come open softly in the kitchen, the couch sinks softly under Ichigo's weight as he plops down on it. Within seconds, without thinking, the TV is on, and he is staring blankly at the screen as He hates the show. The smell of coffee drifts into the living room from the kitchen.

In a few minutes Ishida enters and puts two cups of coffee on the table.

"I know you don't like it this way but my coffee pot is broken," he says blandly, as if he really feels the need to apologize for something like not having the proper equipment to make coffee quickly.  
"It's okay. I don't care." He doesn't. Ichigo reaches out for the cup closest to him and takes a drink. It is boiling hot and bitter.  
"That's good, then."

They sit in silence in a room that is faded and gray (like their love? or was that never there to begin with?), sipping scalding hot coffee that tastes cheap and bitter.

Ichigo is tempted to say something, about the weather, about how ass-cold Ishida's house is, about sex, about the scarf, about anything, just to hear himself talk. It is creepy to simply sit in a house with the TV playing softly and the coffee cooling much more quickly than it should. They should be _talking _on a day like this, figuring things out. It would help even if they just talked about stupid things; just _talking _would help. He opens his mouth to say something but then Ishida is over him, face centimeters from his own, hair hanging down onto his face, and before he has even registered what is going on Ishida's lips are pressed to his own. It is soft, soft, and faded, very faded. Ishida's tongue dips into his mouth, ghosts over the roof of his mouth, his molars, his canines, incisors. There is something deliriously comfortable about feeling the warmth of his body against the cold of the room. Ichigo reaches a hand up to touch him, maybe his shoulder, maybe his arm, maybe his hair, but then Ishida is gone. The only sound is the soft moist friction of their mouths coming apart and the creak of the couch as it adjusts to the subtraction of Ishida's weight and the rustle of fabric and the slam of the front door as he leaves. Ichigo stays there on the couch like that for awhile, blinking and feeling the breeze from the ceiling fan skitter over his face, fleetingly.

"God _damn _it," he says to himself, in the faded gray emptiness of the house. "God _damn _it." He gets to his feet, grabs his backpack, and leaves Ishida's house for home. It is cold outside, and starting to rain down a mixture of snow and rain and ice. It accumulates on the curbs in dirty piles of slush.

Ichigo hates the winter.

0000000000

The school is quiet, disinterested the next day. Ishida did not get back to his home until around midnight, after he had walked until his feet had felt ready to fall off and his clothes had stuck to him wetly and his hair had been plastered down to his head, clinging to his face in dark strands (needy strands) that had refused to let go and had just stuck to his fingers when he tried to brush them away. He never did get to sleep.

No, he hadn't gotten to sleep. He had sat up, first on his bed, and then on the couch, tracing patterns on it, running his fingers over it, laying down on it at times and pressing his face into the place where the seat cushions meet the cushions on the back. He had thought, then, that in underneath the cleanliness of his house he could vaguely smell Ichigo, some overbearing, powerful, overwhelmingly _Ichigo _smell underneath it all, and although later he thinks that it was just his imagination then it had been some sort of comfort, even though when he had walked out of his house out into the rain he hadn't even thought that he needed comfort. He felt almost tired, then. Almost. The taste of Ichigo's mouth, predominantly like the bitter coffee he had made for them both but with that powerful overwhelmingly _Ichigo _taste like his smell underneath that taste, had kept him from really getting tired. So he hadn't slept.

He isn't tired, though, even if he can't concentrate. He sits at his desk, fiddling with his pencil, wondering if he will be able to understand the lecture tomorrow if he doesn't pay attention today, wondering if Ichigo is paying attention, wondering how long Ichigo stayed at his house after he left, wondering if Ichigo walked in the rain for hours before he finally made it home, if his hair clung to his face and head in damp needy strands.

The school is quiet, disinterested.

Even the teacher's lecture is slow and somber, muted the way the sound of rain is muted against the roof, muted the way sex sounds are muted through apartment walls: audible, but as if through a filter, as if underwater. Quiet, disinterested. It is as if the whole school stayed awake all night, as if everyone is tired, in a daze. Ishida isn't tired.

By the time lunch-time rolls around students are slumped in their desks, their heads propped up on their hands, eyelids drooping. They all pack up their things slowly, mechanically, and go out of the room like ghosts, drifting palely, until it is just Ichigo and Ishida left in the room.

"Ishida." Ichigo is in front of his desk now, hands braced on either side of it, his face kissing-distance from Ishida's.  
"Kurosaki, what…"  
"Come with me."

Ichigo grabs his wrist and drags him out of his desk, pulls him out of the classroom and down the hall. He turns sharply into the bathroom and then lets go of Ishida's wrist. Before Ishida has even had time to register what is happening, Ichigo's fist connects with his face and he is on the ground, his vision filled with flashing black spots and the tiny gray tiles on the bathroom floor. When the spots clear (it feels like a dizzy millennium but it is probably less than fifteen seconds), he pushes himself to a sitting position and touches at his face experimentally, wincing.

"I think I know what that was for," he says. He gets to his feet and he is face-to-face with Ichigo. There are bright, hectic spots of color high up on Ichigo's cheekbones, and his brows are furrowed so deeply that Ishida thinks it must be giving him a headache. It is an entire minute before Ichigo replies.  
"If you didn't I'd have to hit you again," he says, and the words sound forced out. He is panting a little.  
"I'd deserve it, if you did." It is awkward, uncomfortable, as if Ichigo never really thought of what he was going to say or do.

Ichigo looks up, then, and there is knowledge in his eyes-, Ishida knows now that he's figured it out, and he knows what it is that he's figured out, and he knows that, from the very beginning, he will let him. It is only natural. It's how they work, how they compromise, how everything works out in the end, except this time Ichigo needed to do something else, and now that is over and they have to fill the empty silence with themselves: they know what they need to do to do that.

Within five seconds they are in a stall and within another three Ichigo's mouth is on his, hot like his hand is on the cool tiles of the bathroom wall, sweaty and shaking a little, fingers curling helplessly.

It's not a war for dominance. Ichigo obviously has no intentions of submitting.

When Ishida runs his hands through Ichigo's hair (almost tentative, almost needy, needy like damp strands of hair clinging to a pale cold wet face) he feels the dampness there and suddenly there is no way he can pretend it's just sex, because it is something more. It is how they communicate (because if they tried to do it with words they would talk on forever and ever and ever and ever and ev), how they express themselves. And maybe, if they manage not to screw it up, it can be a kind of medicine.

Yes, maybe it can be a medicine. He can feel Ichigo's hands press him against the wall. Their clothes fall away slowly, like palely drifting ghosts.

It is easier, kinder, simpler, to communicate and heal this way. Because, even though it is possibly vulgar (And what is vulgarity, anyways? Piles of dirty slush melting on the sides of a slick dirty road, chrysanthemum petals fluttering to the ground? Strands of blue and yellow yarn twisting out of a scarf?), the way Ichigo's hand is slipping into his pants, he can almost feel the wrongness, any wrongs that they did before, slipping away.

Now his pants are down by his ankles, and he thinks suddenly, strikingly, in a way that makes his knees weaker than they were before, that Ichigo knows what he likes before he's even sure of it himself. It strikes him, then, that Ichigo has paid attention when they made love before, and he thinks that that is very sweet of him, to not think of only himself during (because Ishida will admit to himself, if not to anyone else, that when he makes love with Ichigo he is not thinking of remembering the movements that make him moan loudest or the places that make him squirm the most when they're touched, but simply of increasing his own pleasure), very sweet, too sweet, more sweet than he deserves.

Ishida tells him to lock the door and he does so without complaint, but an easy compliance that is still overbearingly, overwhelmingly _Ichigo_ and then he returns back to him and gets on his knees. His mouth is hotter than when it was against Ishida's own, when his lips are around the head of his penis and his hands are wrapped around the rest of him, sliding and almost squeezing and rubbing in fast strokes, soft strokes, any kind of strokes he could imagine.

It feels good, Ishida thinks -- thinks he maybe says, but can't tell, until Ichigo lets go and his mind clears just a little bit, and he is almost sure he _did _say it. Then Ichigo has lube in his hands, dug out from the front pocket of his backpack, right when he was about to tell him he had a tube in his backpack, too, and he thinks maybe, just maybe, they both thought this would happen because that's what always _does _happen, that's what can be expected from their relationship, which is built on physical touch, taste. It's just how it is, except now that's not _all _it is, and there's more emotion, which he thinks (knows) has always been there, now, even though they covered it up because that's the type of people they are (but it's not all they are, not anymore, not now, not when Ichigo is so _close to him _and he can feel him breathing down his neck, with the type of physical closeness that is as emotional as it is tangible, and that makes them something else, something they weren't, but now somehow are, maybe always were).

Ichigo is flat up against him, Ishida pressed still against the wall, wondering how they are both standing at all, wondering if maybe they will just stay like this, simple and loving and something _more _without there being anything more at all. Then Ichigo moves a little bit, and suddenly he is entering him, face pressed into Ishida's collarbone and Ishida groans half in pleasure and half in pain because it's painful, it always will be, this kind of unnatural coupling, but it's still so powerfully _Ichigo _that he can't help but wonder why it is considered unnatural at all.

Ichigo stays there for a second, a second that feels like it stretches on for a (dizzy millennium) an eternity except it doesn't, not really, not in retrospect, and then he pulls back and grips Ishida's hips in his hands (which feels good, too: it is rough, it is unadulterated, it is no longer angry but it's more than anger could ever be… it is frustration that says 'you will understand, you will get it, you will see', and oh, Ishida does see, he does get it, he gets it all, a little bit more, with every thrust, every flex of Ichigo's thumbs on his hip bones and his fingers stretching over to rest on his buttocks, every grunt, every quiet breath not quite pant that is still somehow _screaming, _screaming for release), and Ishida doesn't think it's vulgar or crude anymore.

It's not quite beautiful, of course, but it's close.

Ichigo rears back, thrusts back in, a slow rocking that lets their hips meet together in a kiss in the same moment their lips do, before they are running their heads down on different sides of the other's neck, kissing there, biting and nipping in a sense that is not romantic but is necessary, a necessary medicine, and Ichigo increases the pace at a rate that seems so natural, increases it at a rate that Ishida thinks must be engrained in his body for it to be so fluid, that both their bodies must be telling him to.

"Faster, damn it, faster...damn you, Kurosaki, _faster_," is that it? Or is that just some voice in the back of his mind, the dark place in the back that controls all these desires and urges and makes him moan like a whore in a bathroom stall? There is only movement-, back and forth, back and forth, in and out, in and out, like breathing, aligned with their breathing, still as harsh and needy.

Ishida's head falls back limply against the tiled bathroom wall, and he realizes they're _sliding _with it, up and down, because now they're _sweaty _and _slick _and _wet _(wet like the way a person gets wet when he walks out in the rain after sunset?). Ichigo has stopped kissing and biting down his neck: now he is just standing there, thrusting, forehead pressed into Ishida's collarbone, arms hoisting up Ishida's legs, sweat rolling down the sides of his face.

Their bellies touch each other, soft, and sliding; their rhythm dissolves into something even more desperate, and then there are Ichigo's hands on him and his legs are sliding to touch to the ground, maybe because that far away voice was telling him to touch him there again.

Ishida doesn't know, doesn't care, not anymore.

Then he _is _coming, and a moment later so is Ichigo, and then they are panting together in much the same rhythm and Ichigo pulls out and they both slide to the floor.

It occurs to him, then, that they are still at school, that they are on lunch break, and that break will be over soon. He extricates himself from the tangle of limbs that their coupling has turned into, cleans himself off mechanically, pulls his clothes on.

"I'm sorry, Kurosaki," he says, and it is awkward, still, almost more so now that they are so sweaty and slick and wet and orgasm is nothing except for a fading, throbbing memory sinking into the dark parts of his mind that make him moan like a whore and there is already a dull ache spreading down his legs and into his lower back.

Ichigo's eyes are glazed as he follows Ishida's example and pulls on his own clothes.

"I don't think there's anything to apologize for," he says, and Ishida thinks he is telling the truth.

When they exit the bathroom, both disheveled and flushed and very nearly panting and Ishida with a bruise spreading over his cheek, if anybody heard anything or saw them exiting with guilty looks on their faces, nobody says a word. The school is quiet, disinterested.

Quiet, disinterested.

Snow has started falling outside. It is real snow, not the frozen rain and sleet that has come down before. It slides gently against the windows, quietly, disinterestedly. When school gets out and they walk home, Ichigo puts an arm around his shoulder, and he doesn't pull away. Orihime and Tatsuki and Asano and Chad and the rest seem to notice, seem to know, but they don't seem to care, not on a level that matters. They are quiet, disinterested.

Ishida can live with disinterested.

School is out for winter break the next day. Until school starts up again, they do not see each other and they do not talk to each other, and it is not until lights are on outside and the blinds are closed against their brightness and every person is alone in his own, cold bed that either of them even thinks of the other.


End file.
